This presentation addresses the most well-known challenges in managing multilingual knowledge organization systems. Such challenges are presented and it is discussed how they have been addressed with the implementation of a collaborative tool called MoKi.

1. Modeling and Management of
multilingual KOSs in the
Agricultural Domain
Mauro Dragoni
Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK)
Shape and Evolve Living Knowledge Unit (SHELL)
https://shell.fbk.eu/index.php/Mauro_Dragoni - dragoni@fbk.eu
Organic.Lingua Best Practices and Tools for Multilingual Online Services Workshop,
Webinar – March 27th, 2014

2. Background
 Knowledge Organization Systems
 Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs), encompass all
types of schemes for organizing information and promoting
knowledge management.
 KOSs include various classification types & schemes
(Glossaries, Taxonomies, Thesauri, Classifications,
Ontologies).
 They have been introduced to reduce the ambiguity of natural
language when describing and retrieving information.

3. The importance of KOS
 … in general
 Common dictionary of terms.
 A shared and formal interpretation of the domain.
 Solve ambiguities;
 Share knowledge (not only between humans, but also
between machines)
 … in Information Access
 Different people may use different words for the same concept
or employ different concepts to refer to the same scientific
terms.
 KOSs may improve access to (mostly digitally) stored
information, by offering structured ways to represent and
model it.

4. Challenges
 Evolution of existing KOSs (revisions,
additions/deletions of concepts);
 Multilinguality issues (KOSs available in multiple
languages);
 Collaborative working (groups of experts based in
different countries with different competencies working
on the same tasks/scenarios).
 Exposure of the modeled information and linking with
third-party KOSs

5. Evolution
 Changes in conceptualization
 Increasing/decreasing the granularity of the
representation
 Knowledge enrichment

6. Multilinguality
 Break the language barriers
 Make contents accessible transparently with respect to
the language
 Increasing the capability of sharing knowledge

7. Collaboration

8. Exposure and Linking
 Make knowledge consumable by third-party services
 Avoiding the replication of the knowledge
 Contextualize the modeled knowledge within the
domain

9. An architecture for collaborative
modeling, evolution, and
exposure of multilingual KOSs

10. MoKi basic features
 It is based on the use of wikis
 It implements different views built based on the
expertise of different users
 It stores information both in unstructured and
structured ways

11. Different views for different roles

12. Support for multilingual ontology
management
Modelling tool
MoKithe Modelling WiKi ---
Domain expert
Knowledge Engineer
Knowledge Engineer
Domain expert
Translation Services
Language Expert
Language Expert

13. Connections with external components and
data exposure
 Automatic suggestions of mappings between ontologies
 Managing ontology evolution
 Entity workflow management
 Exposure service in different formats (OWL, SKOS, …)
 Terms/Concepts extractor
 …

14. What happened in the Organic.Lingua project
 What does Organic.Lingua MoKi include?
o The connection with three different machine translation services.
o An ontology enrichment service for retrieving suggestions about
new concepts based on the analysis of external textual resources.
o A mapping suggestion service allowing the creation of linking
between the Organic.Lingua ontology and external ontologies.
o The support for entity evolution workflow in order to control the
update of each entity defined in the Organic.Lingua ontology.
o An ontology service providing an API Rest Service for the exposure
of the ontology in Linked Open Data

15. What happened in the Organic.Lingua project
 How the Organic.Lingua ontology evolved during the
project:
o entity creation: 54
o entity update: 2160
o entity deletion: 25
o entity translation: 2136
o discussion creation: 218
o discussion update: 492
o 2 languages added: Italian and Latvian
o description added for all languages
o 260 concepts have been mapped with AGROVOC

16. Mauro Dragoni
https://shell.fbk.eu/index.php/Mauro_Dragoni
dragoni@fbk.eu